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1. Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Thursday, 13-Jul-2023 04:50:17 UTC Bernie

   • arclight
   • Ben Clifford

   @arclight @benc I agree with the statement that Visual Source Safe was absolutely the worst VCS ever invented.

   My customers used to do release management by moving "pins" on individual file revisions they wanted to be in a certain release: "pick foo.cpp version 7 and config.ini version 13" 🤦♀️

   The action of moving a pin wasn't itself version-controlled or even logged 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jul-2023 22:29:32 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     • arclight
     • Ben Clifford

     @arclight @benc Mercurial had a better UI, easier to learn for those coming from CVS and Subversion.

     Linus designed git from the bottom up, exposing internal details and jargon at the UI level.

     But... hg always felt sluggish to me, particularly on large repositories. That's probably why it won in the long term.

     Had Mercurial been rewritten in C or C++ earlier, paying more attention to performance and scalability, it would have been the clear winner.

   • arclight (arclight@oldbytes.space)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jul-2023 22:29:33 UTC arclight

     in reply to

     • Ben Clifford

     @codewiz @benc My last employer was still using VMS text libraries (see https://docs.vmssoftware.com/docs/VSI_CMD_DEF_LIBRARIAN_MSG_ULITILIES_23-AUGUST-2019.pdf page 44 or so)

     I tried interesting people in SVN or even git and I just got blank stares. From 2009 to 2017 I tried almost everything to interest them in anything modern and supported. Failing, I used Mercurial personally for all of my projects because at the time (2008) I could not find a coherent git tutorial. Mercurial took a few days at most to understand and I never had any trouble with it, nothing like what I keep having with git.

     Still, git was the popular choice, it was supported by TFS, and IMO it was the easiest sell to people in a mainly Windows environment. There was a sudden interest in git when a regression slipped out to a big client; I started working up a demo and tutorial but was laid off a few months later.

   • mike (mike@micro.mkp.ca)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 02:06:40 UTC mike

     in reply to

     @codewiz I used hg right up until a year or two ago. The nail in the coffin was that magit is just too good.

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 02:06:40 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     • mike

     @mike I wonder how's rhg, the full rewrite of Mercurial in Rust.